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Planting a Seed for the Environment

By Kelly Slivka July 30, 2012 11:56 amJuly 30, 2012 11:56 am

Two years ago, after earning an environmental science degree at the University of Virginia, Michelle Henry signed up to work for a farming commune in rural Thailand overseen by a small Thai nonprofit. It was a challenge, given that she did not speak Thai, but luckily she had an arsenal of field skills dating from her high school years, like the ability to test soils, assess the land’s potential and apply the best possible growing techniques.

Canon EnvirothonStudents studying soil at a field station as part of an earlier stage of this year’s Envirothon competition.

She picked up that knowledge through the Canon Envirothon, a nonprofit environmental education program for high school students in Canada and the United States. Throughout the year, participating students learn about soil, land use, aquatic ecology, forestry and wildlife from their high school teachers and can then apply their knowledge in local and state competitions. The top state competitors proceed to a national competition: last week the 25th annual Envirothon was held at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa.

The national competition, which involved 54 five-member teams this year, culminates in a final challenge in which the teams are confronted with a modern environmental problem and must then devise and present a solution. For this year’s final challenge, the teams had to come up with low-impact development strategies to fix storm water runoff problems in two Pennsylvania townships. The winners, a group of students from Pembroke High School in Kansas City, Mo., received $25,000 in scholarship funds from Canon.

Ms. Henry’s team won the national competition in 2005 by drafting a plan to restore Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield to the condition in which it is thought to have existed in 1861.
Some 500,000 high school students took part in this year’s program, either through their studies or by competing on the state or national level, said the program’s executive director, Clay Burns. Teachers sometimes introduce the program at their schools after hearing about it at conferences and serve as advisers to students taking part in the competition.

Mr. Burns said that many high school students were out of touch with important environmental issues because of unevenness in state or local curriculums.The Envirothon program can pick up the slack by teaching students learn how to profile soils, manage a cultivated forest or assess the health of aquifers, he said.

The program does not make an argument for a specific environmental approach beyond encouraging students to get involved and “to become great stewards,” he said.

Ms. Henry, who attended high school in Media, Pa., said she got involved in the program on a lark. “I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into,” she said. Participating sharpened her environmental consciousness, she said, and before long she was lobbying her local municipality to ensure that a construction company used environmentally responsible methods to build a park in her town.

Two competitors she met at the national competitions ended up becoming her best friends at the University of Virginia, Ms. Henry said, prompting her to major in environmental science rather than international business as she had originally planned.

Although Ms. Henry’s interest in business later revived and she now works for the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, she keeps her hand in on the environmental side. This year she served as a judge in the national Envirothon competition and delivered a speech at the closing ceremony on Thursday.

Michelle HenryMichelle Henry, at center in bright blue shirt, with her Thai co-workers on a farming commune in Khao Yai National Park.

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How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.